For years I’ve been trying to find a goofy semi-gothic
adventure romance novel I read as a kid. I used to ask periodically on DorothyL
(does DorothyL still exist?) for help, and I would always get all these
interesting but ultimately not useful suggestions. Since the only thing I could
remember was a scene where someone throws something in the fireplace and it
turns color and poisonous gas issues forth… Oh, no. I had the title. But it
turns out the title was wrong. Somehow I believed the book was called Smile and Be a Villain.
I don’t know where I got that from. It turns out it was
called The Gilded Sarcophagus (which
sounds like something I would love, doesn’t it?) and it’s by Charlotte Hunt
(Doris Marjorie Hodges). It’s amusing seeing Hunt’s author bio. It seems she
wrote a lot of scholarly articles on the occult, etc. In purely mundane matters Miss Hunt is addicted to walking, cooking,
tape recording, and Siamese cats.
We authors don’t change much through the ages, do we? Of
course no one is a “Miss” anymore. And you don’t see a lot of authors addicted
to “tape recording.”
Anyway, I read the description of the book -- which turned
out to be first in a series (I did know there was a sequel, but a series!) and
I decided to take a chance and I ordered about five different Hunt novels. So The Gilded Sarcophagus arrived last
week, and I flipped through it and…
…the letter floated
from my hand into the fire…
“Damn,” I muttered,
and tried to snatch it back. But it already caught on, bursting into purple
flame--a weird, evanescent flame. Suddenly my nostrils were flaring to the
scent of some sickly, unknown perfume. A plume of white smoke puffed out, thick
and suffocating, catching at my throat and making me want to retch.
So it turns out that this is a series about psychiatrist
Paul Holton and his battle against Dr. Blackton and the mystic Circle of Ra.
The adventure begins…
